This is a tale of a house cursed through the centuries by a man who was hanged for witchcraft—a house haunted by the ghosts of its dead and the terror of its living inhabitants. The blighted house controls the fates of four Pyncheons: Hepzibah, an elderly recluse; Clifford, her delicate brother; Phoebe, their young country cousin; and Jaffrey, a devil incarnate whose greedy quest for secret wealth is marked by murder and terrible vengeance from a restless grave.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's works are imbued with a mixture of the actual and the imaginary, and The House of the Seven Gables is an enduring example. The puritanical Jaffrey Pyncheon is the embodiment of Hawthorne's own ancestor, a